After Beheadings, Pressure on Obama

For at least the third time in my life, the United States is at war in Iraq. That’s an inconvenient truth for an administration that wanted to end the war there in 2011. Recent bombings and beheadings in Iraq and Syria only underscore this point.

We — the United States, the West and our allies in the Middle East — are at war with the most destructive, nihilistic and radical fanatics we can imagine. Today’s ground zero is on a battlefield the United States abandoned a few years ago.

I served four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as a military intelligence officer and am under no illusions about this enemy. It is ruthless and clearly not on the run. Its capacity for harm has grown over the last three years, and it has made it abundantly clear that it wants to do our homeland harm.

The United States cannot shrink from this fight, just as it could not declare victory and go home because we grew tired of wars overseas. That kind of wishful thinking ignores hard realities. We tried it in Iraq, and we have reaped the proverbial whirlwind there.

JAMES D. EDWARDS Herndon, Va., Sept. 3, 2014

The writer is a retired United States Army colonel.

To the Editor:

This deeply obscene activity of beheading prisoners gains so much more spin once it goads helpless citizens in the “enemy” country into indignant cries for retribution. It is a primitive way of magnifying feelings of hatred and fear.

As an American who lives in Italy, I have been impressed by a news channel here that announced it would not broadcast images of such events. The journalists framed their thinking by saying it was only helping the terrorists obtain their objective of luring the West into war. They would follow such events by reporting them, but not by using the propaganda images.

So what will give comfort to Americans? Would echoing someone like Senator John McCain, whose response to every international crisis is bluster, provide solace? With so many mini-crises occurring in the world, and with American power exhausted by our Iraqi adventure abroad and political dysfunction at home, it is difficult to find a balanced, nuanced response to counter each crisis.

Informing our friends that we cannot be the only, or even the primary, solution to every problem, while telling Americans that there are limits to our influence, may be the best and most honest course of action. In the Mideast, the nations there, along with Europe, must step up more to counter threats like the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In Ukraine, what more should we do or can we do beyond sanctions?

President Obama was wrong to admit that we don’t yet have a strategy for Syria for dealing with this new, metastasized threat of Islamic terrorism. Beyond that unnecessary admission, however, he is simply recognizing the limits of our influence and being transparent in his plans for using it.

DAVID KUZIEMKO Sterling Heights, Mich., Sept. 2, 2014

To the Editor:

Frank Bruni takes to task President Obama’s tone-deaf statement, in this time of explosive upheavals, that “the world has always been messy.” This president’s cool demeanor in a hot world bespeaks a passive detachment that unsettles rather than reassures.

Certain words and actions are associated with recent presidents: For Jimmy Carter, malaise comes to mind; for Ronald Reagan, the sunny invocation of “It’s morning again in America”; for George H. W. Bush, prudence; for Bill Clinton, “I feel your pain”; for George W. Bush, “bring them on.”

For this temperamentally cautious president, the bully pulpit has become a mere lectern, and suddenly we’ve come back full circle to a growing sense of malaise and restive drifting.

Each president is a tacit rebuttal of his predecessor. Next stop: “morning in America,” or rather mourning for a lost America and wondering how to right its course.

BARBARA ALLEN KENNEY Santa Fe, N.M., Sept. 2, 2014

To the Editor:

I am not troubled by President Obama’s comments at all. Are there people out there who believe it’s possible to have a strategy in Syria?

And Mr. Obama has it right historically. Things in this country have been much worse than they are today. One hundred years ago World War I began. The Great Depression, the McCarthy era, Vietnam and Watergate all strike me as more serious issues than those we face today.

Striking fear in our enemies? Remember Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum to speak softly and carry a big stick? I rather suspect that all foreign leaders understand that we carry the biggest stick.

Have we so quickly forgotten that our last president talked “tough” — and how well that worked out? I find Mr. Obama’s candor refreshing and honest. We’re grown-ups; we can handle the truth.

MARC CHAFETZ Washington, Sept. 2, 2014

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: After Beheadings, Pressure on Obama. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe